Using Owen’s fantastic WordPress plugin antileech, I have successfully taken control over new posts appearing on a splog intent on copying them. Instead of getting actual post content, the splog gets a message written by me. Right now that message advocates gambling and buying firearms, two things expressly forbidden by the Adsense TOS (read Fight dirty by entrapping splogs using antiLeech).

If you could publish any message you wanted on a splog that was stealing your content, what would it be?

Rules:

• The splog removes all markup — no IMG’s and no links.
• There is a 140 word limit. The splog doesn’t like to post long entries and truncates after about 140 characters.
• The splog makes new categories based on the categories that the post came from. For example, if I put this post in a category on my blog called ‘eat shit and die’, the splog will make a new category called ‘eat shit and die’ and put whatever message you would like in the post content.
• Like categories, the splog accepts tags and creates new ones as they come in.
• The splog takes the real post title, regardless of fake content.
• The splog takes the real author name (at the time of posting) and links it to the original post.

The overall goal should be to get the splog’s adsense account yanked for violation of terms (see the bulleted list 1/3 down for some ideas on what constitutes a violation in Google’s eyes). Secondary goals are possible as well, one example would be to get the splog booted from their webhost (dreamhost). However, I feel it is important to first make sure that the revenue stream dies. If something else happens along the way, great.

Anyone care to share their splogging revenge fantasy?

Entrap: To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act.

With the recent release of AntiLeech, an anti splog plugin for WordPress by Owen Winkler, there finally exists a real method of fighting back against content scraping thieves. AntiLeech is a plugin for WordPress that attempts to serve up fake content to known splogs. The plugin identifies splogs by either their User-Agents or IP address (user supplied). From the plugin page:

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them.

AntiLeech also offer up the option of creating custom content to serve up only to splog bots. This option is how I now wildly progistcate on how to entrap would be splogers. By using AntiLeech, a splog will publish on their site a fake piece of content that you or I write. This content can be anything…. » Read the rest of the entry..

Observe the best of today’s splog spam my filters caught. Somewhere between step 1 and step 1 + n, this guy screwed up. I’m thinking it was on step 2, but it could have been steps 3 or 4. Care to guess?

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Here is my reply: » Read the rest of the entry..

I’ve written about methods of alerting contextual advertising networks to abuse before [see Abusing Yahoo!’s Contextual Advertising (YPN) — not clickfraud] and have been pleased to see some action on the front. But things are still too complicated and time consuming. Spammers continue to prosper at the expense of us all (see why everyone loses).

The following guide explains two ways of fighting back and alerting the Adsense program of abuse that you stumble across when browsing the web (skip the preamble and head right to the two methods). A typical scenario involves the following: » Read the rest of the entry..